Abstract
Abstract. The highly accurate measurements of the hyperspectral Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) are used in numerical weather prediction (NWP), atmospheric chemistry and climate monitoring. As the second generation of the European Polar System (EPS-SG) is being developed, a new generation of IASI instruments has been designed to fly on board the MetOp-SG constellation: IASI New Generation (IASI-NG). In order to prepare the arrival of this new instrument, and to evaluate its impact on NWP and atmospheric chemistry applications, a set of IASI and IASI-NG simulated data was built and made available to the public to set a common framework for future impact studies. This paper describes the information available in this database and the procedure followed to run the IASI and IASI-NG simulations. These simulated data were evaluated by comparing IASI-NG to IASI observations. The result is also presented here. Additionally, preliminary impact studies of the benefit of IASI-NG compared to IASI on the retrieval of temperature and humidity in a NWP framework are also shown in the present work. With a channel dataset located in the same wave numbers for both instruments, we showed an improvement of the temperature retrievals throughout the atmosphere, with a maximum in the troposphere with IASI-NG and a lower benefit for the tropospheric humidity.
Highlights
A huge quantity of improvements have taken place in the first decade of the 21st century with the launch of new infrared (IR) sounders such as the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) in 2002 (Aumann et al, 2003), the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) in 2006 (Cayla, 2001; Chalon et al, 2001) and the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) in 2011 (Glumb et al, 2003). These instruments have drastically raised the amount of information available for meteorological purposes compared to the precedent HIRS (High-resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder) infrared sounder, launched in the late 1970s, which offers 19 IR and 1 visible channels as compared with the thousands of channels available in this new generation of instruments
In order to achieve this goal, the vertical profiles from a selection of atmospheric constituents in the different IR absorption bands measured by both instruments were extracted for each date from global analyses provided by the Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate (MACC) project of the Copernicus programme1
Two kinds of validations have been presented: the first one consists of the evaluation of the IASI simulations, and the second one is an evaluation of the gain brought by IASI New Generation (IASI-NG) with respect to the IASI one with a 1D-Var experiment
Summary
A huge quantity of improvements have taken place in the first decade of the 21st century with the launch of new infrared (IR) sounders such as the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) in 2002 (Aumann et al, 2003), the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) in 2006 (Cayla, 2001; Chalon et al, 2001) and the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) in 2011 (Glumb et al, 2003) These instruments have drastically raised the amount of information available for meteorological purposes compared to the precedent HIRS (High-resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder) infrared sounder, launched in the late 1970s, which offers 19 IR and 1 visible channels as compared with the thousands of channels available in this new generation of instruments. Ation (MetOp-SG) and IRS (Infrared Sounder) on board the MeteoSat Third Generation satellites, which will be launched in 2020 The former of these two instruments covers the same spectral range as IASI with a noise reduction of at least a factor of 2 and a twice-as-high spectral resolution.
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